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A doubly immature Parliament

UK Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan’s role in political life is to be what the Germans call a Stoerenfried – a troublemaker or agent provocateur. Drawing on his experiences as a member of the European Parliament, he uses his column in the UK’s most articulate Eurosceptic newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, to highlight what he sees as the worst excesses of the EU and its elected assembly, chipping away like an enemy within at the Union’s self-image. But last week Hannan was himself responsible for one of those worst excesses.

In comparing measures taken by Hans-Gert Pöttering, the president of the European Parliament, to the Enabling Act which gave Adolf Hitler control of the Reichstag in 1933, Hannan went beyond all bounds of taste and decency. If Hannan has learnt nothing else in his time in Brussels and Strasbourg, he will have learnt that references to 1930s Germany are dangerous territory. He later backtracked from his comments, recognising that they were personally offensive to Pöttering, whose father died in the Second World War without ever meeting his son. Despite the apology, Hannan is to be expelled from the EPP-ED group.

His idiotic and shameful comparison managed to obscure an important point about democracy in the European Parliament, although not necessarily the one that Hannan was trying to draw attention to. The vote that provoked Hannan’s comment was to grant Pöttering as president and chairman of the plenary the right to decide whether to agree to MEPs’ requests for a roll call vote – one in which the electronic voting system is used to ensure an accurate record of who voted and which way. Under the Parliament’s own rules, a group of 40 MEPs or a political group can request a roll call vote.

The constitutional affairs committee voted last week (with opposition only from Jens-Peter Bonde, leader of the Independence and Democracy (ID) group and Jim Allister, formerly a Democratic Unionist, now an independent) to give Pöttering the powers he sought. This was the decision endorsed by the full Parliament last Thursday (31 January).

Eurosceptic MEPs from the ID group were planning to use the power to ask for roll call votes­ to delay voting on a report by Spanish centre-right MEP Íñigo Méndez de Vigo and UK Socialist MEP Richard Corbett on the Lisbon treaty. The report is to be put to the plenary this month. There are expected to be hundreds of amendments and with a roll call vote MEPs would have to cast a vote on each of them. In addition, Eurosceptic MEPs were irritating their opponents by using another spoiling tactic: a one-minute speech after each vote explaining how they had voted.

The Independence and Democracy group and the other Eurosceptic MEPs scattered among the other groups will lose the vote on the Lisbon treaty. The Méndez de Vigo-Corbett report on the EU constitution was approved by the Parliament in January 2005 with 500 votes in favour and 147 against. So the voting method will not change the result.

What is at stake is more the degree of transparency that the Parliament is prepared to accept and practise. The arguments presented against roll call votes are unconvincing. Each vote is supposed to cost between €300-€500 but this figure has been reached by dividing the cost of the electronic voting system by the number of roll call votes since it was installed. This is a fixed cost and the more roll call votes there are, the cheaper each vote becomes.

The Parliament is aware that the alternative, a show of hands in the chamber, is unreliable. When results have been challenged and recounts made, the final outcome has often been completely different from what the president of the plenary session concluded after the first show of hands.

MEPs themselves have also expressed disquiet about the use of voting lists by which political groups instruct their members which way they should vote on each amendment. The MEPs individually are frequently ignorant of what each change means.

The disquiet is magnified by a sense that pressure for a rapid agreement with the Council of Ministers on co-decision dossiers is leading MEPs to make hasty agreements at first reading without exercising the scrutiny that is their duty.

All of this is bad for the EU’s democratic image and especially for the Parliament, which so often holds itself up as the guardian of openness and transparency in other institutions.

The Parliament is to gain a substantial increase in powers if and when the Lisbon treaty is ratified. But it must prove itself worthy of those powers. Hannan is right to point out that the suppression of opinion which dissents from the majority consensus in the Parliament is worrying.

He was right, too, to cast doubt on the means by which Pöttering was setting aside the Parliament’s own rules of procedure. Referring the question to the constitutional affairs committee was a sham – its members are, for the most part, avowed enthusiasts for the Treaty of Lisbon. Parliament is in the middle of a post-adolescent crisis: it is growing up and beginning to be taken seriously, but it is still prone to childish behaviour. The use of procedural tricks is a sign of democratic life. Scrapping the rulebook is not the appropriate response. Dissent has its place in a healthy democracy.

The Parliament has the equipment to carry out roll call votes. MEPs should use the technology for any controversial votes and they should not shy away from revealing how each of them voted. This is what the citizens who elected them deserve. To do otherwise would simply play into the hands of those like Hannan who enjoy seeing their own worst accusations about the EU’s undemocratic tendencies illustrated by its only directly elected institution.